What are the steps from pitching to closing a funding round?

Description

Rob Coneybeer, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures explains the process and steps from the first pitch meeting to closing the funding round.

Video Transcript

What are the steps from pitching to closing a funding round?

For a typical company that comes in that we end up investing in, the way that the funnel typically works is there’s an initial call or an initial email connection and then there might be a first meeting. That first meeting could be anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, with the single partner or investment professional at Shasta, for example. During that meeting, we look to learn as much as we can about the product, about the entrepreneurs, the markets, a lot of questions like that.

For us what we tend to be focused on is what is it that you’re building and early on in that meeting, it’s important for the entrepreneur to really explain here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it. Who they are tend to support whatever that product is. So it’s better to talk about the product of the demo, give the service demo up front. Then based on that, will go and set up extra meetings if we like the company and typically in that second meeting there will be more of my colleagues, for example, will come into that meeting.

Then we might have, if we continue to be interested, diligence requests that come out of that, and we might ask for questions about the product, we might want to visit the company, meet more team members, learn more about the market. Some of that stuff we’ll do with the entrepreneur who is giving us the diligence information and some we will go off and do our own work about the market. What would come out of that before we make an investment decision typically, is references and that would be both customer references from the company, as well as professional references, people that have worked with him before. And we’ll call a lot of people, we will call both people that are on the reference sheet and we will also figure out how we know some of the people that work with those entrepreneurs, because we want to get to know who they are as well.

Then typically, a final step would be to come in and give a full partnership presentation and for our firm, by the time, you come into the partner meeting, it’s probably down to about one out of three of those companies, one out of two of those companies that we end up making a decision to invest in.